(This is a non-cardiac-modelling rant, probably specific to UK researchers, so feel free to skip it!)

I am a massive fan of open access publication and open science in general. It is quite sensible that the public gets to read all of the research they are funding, and it has to be the best way to share ideas and let science happen without any barriers.

But I’m sure we aren’t doing it very efficiently at the moment, some very well-intentioned policies are making publishing a real nuisance in the UK.

Here’s a list of the all the places where papers we are publishing at the moment are ending up. When you google a paper title, you are likely to find hits for all of these, you have to hope that they all ended up being the same final version of a paper, and aren’t really sure which is best to look at:

On ArXiv/BioRxiv – I think preprint servers are a great way to make a version of your paper open access, get it google-able, and get feedback on it. So we put up papers on BioRxiv, and try (but sometimes forget) to make sure they are updated to match the final accepted article in a journal.

In the actual journal – this is generally the nicest to look at version (but not always!). My funders like to have their articles under a CC-BY licence, which is a great idea, but it generally means a Gold route for open access with quite high fees.

On PubMedCentral(PMC) or Europe’s version (or usually for us, both) – PMC is funded by the NIH, the USA’s main medical research agency, and any papers they funded also have to deposit a version with PMC. This applies even if it is open access – fair enough – I imagine it’s a good idea to have an ‘official backup’ in case a journal shuts down for any reason. Since my funders go for Gold open it is somewhat redundant, and confuses people when they search on PubMed and have to choose which version to look at, but at least it is a big repository with almost all biomedical research in one place (give or take the European version – please just pool your resources EU and USA! Does Brexit mean we’ll also have to put a version in a UK-PMC too? Probably… groan).

On a university/institutional archive – the UK powers-that-be have (very sensibly) decided that (almost) all papers have to be available open access to be eligible for consideration as part of the next Research Excellence Framework which decides how much public money universities get. As far as I can work out, every single university has decided (very un-sensibly) that the only way to ensure this is to launch their own individual paper repository where they also host another open access version of the paper. Ours is called ePrints.

On a couple of other institutional archives – nearly all my papers have co-authors in other universities, who also have to submit the paper again to their own institutional repositories!

So, every single university in the UK is creating the IT databases, infrastructure, front-ends to host large numbers of research papers in perpetuity; as well as employing staff to curate and chase academics to put the right versions into the right forms at the right time with the right licences to keep everyone happy, mostly for papers that are already available open access elsewhere. This is an insane use of resources.

The only thing I can suggest is that UK REF people clarify that any paper that has a final open access accepted text in either arXiv/BioRXiv/a journal/PMC/EuropePMC is automatically eligible. For papers that doesn’t cover, the universities need to get together to either: beef up support for subject-specific repositories; or, just fund a single central repository between them, with a good user interface, to cover any subjects that fall down the cracks between the reliable subject repositories above. Maybe the sort of thing our highly-paid VCs and UUK should be organising 😉